The most recent Object Lessons poster
Part of my job these days involves directing the new Center for Editing & Publishing at Loyola. This center was the culmination of years of collaborations between several of my colleagues (especially Mark Yakich, who was the center's inaugural director last year), and our shared realization that between the New Orleans Review and Object Lessons we had built an incredible foundation for practical, hands-on experience for our students in the realms of editing and publishing. We also have Airplane Reading, which we're planning to resurrect next year. And then there's our award-winning student newspaper The Maroon, which isn't housed in the English department but which lots of our students write for or are otherwise involved with.
We noticed our students getting great internships and jobs—at literary agencies, major trade publishers, academic and university presses, independent presses, and literary journals—after graduating from Loyola. We connected the dots and understood that our students were naturally merging the lessons they'd learned across the different publishing initiatives we had in our department and around Loyola and New Orleans more broadly. So thanks to the intrepid leadership and organizational skills of my colleague Hillary Eklund, who was department chair at the time, we procured some space in our building, launched the Center, and created a five-course editing & publishing certificate available to students across disciplines.
This was not something I ever planned to do as an English professor. I didn't have any formal training in editing, no background in the publishing profession.
Looking back, though, I realize that I had several valuable experiences that informed my work as it exists now. For instance, one time at UC Davis when I was a grad student, Timothy Morton hired me to create the index for the Cambridge Companion to Shelley, which he was then in the process of editing. This was a deep-dive into a particular vein of British Romanticism, as well as a crash-course in manuscript handling and document preparation. I became fascinated with indexing as a reading practice. (Several years later when I met the indexer Susan Clements in New Orleans, I had a basis for truly valuing her work—and Susan ended up being a stedfast indexer, copyeditor, and general cheerleader and connector for Object Lessons until her untimely death in 2020. Susan was a great friend.)
When I was working on my first book, my mentor Caren Kaplan introduced me to Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press, who Caren described to me as "a great book doctor." After my first meeting with Ken I understood exactly what she meant: Ken had a way of holding the idea of a book in his head, and explaining it, and describing how it might work in different forms, if tilted this way, or flipped in that way...he seemed to grasp books as tactile objects as much as intellectual projects, almost like interactive sculptures for brains. Anyway, I remember being taken with Ken's way of talking about books, then. And later when I met Haaris Naqvi who would become my longtime editor and our Bloomsbury editor of Object Lessons, I appreciated Haaris's own style of 'book doctoring'. I think I gathered by osmosis some of this way of working with books, and as I started editing books on my own—Object Lessons books, as well as projects by colleagues and friends far flung—I began to see this as an increasingly gratifying part of my job. And I've tried, lately, to pass along to my students some of this energy and excitement for book editing—and the wide yet small, dynamic yet steeped in traditions, world of publishing in general. (At least the bits and parts of it that I've gotten to know over the past 15 years or so!)
Then as I worked with Ian Bogost on our book series, he invited me into the fast-moving realm of online publishing, writing for The Atlantic occasionally but also giving me the tools and tips that I could translate to so many other venues—like Slate where I've been writing about a range of topics, most recently higher ed and mental health. And again, I take a lot of joy in passing this knowledge on to my students, who have gone on to publish their own essays and even found entire online magazines themselves.
This is just a slice of the editing and publishing activities that are happening in my professional life and in the lives of my colleagues and students at Loyola. But I wanted to take a few paragraphs to reflect on this work, as it wasn't what I was hired or planned to do here—and yet it's become something very real, and fulfilling.
